Rule One for selling reprints is that you make the conclusion of the Abstract as favourable as possible, because this is all that most clinicians read…

On a Lancet study showing a close association between pneumonia and cardiovascular disease:

Golly, somebody has finally twigged that the heart and the lungs are joined up to each other and live in this space called the chest, or thorax. This could have major implications. We could start thinking of providing services for elderly breathless patients rather than making them wander from chest physicians to cardiologists and back again: we could tackle the problem of the post-hospital syndrome by attending to the cardiovascular risks of chest infections and the right ventricular contribution to heart failure; we could even ask patients what their main problems are and whether they are sufficiently addressed to make them feel safe at home. But all this requires a level of genius far beyond the reach of any known health service.

This week in CardioExchange Richard Lehman is not quite as funny as most weeks (perhaps he’s still recovering from New Years’ celebrations?), but he has some interesting and useful comments on a JAMA study comparing real world patients garcinia cambogia plant uses in registries to patients in clinical trials and an impressive Lancet study testing the role of the novel agent serelaxin in acute heart failure.

“So after much hard work and statistical legerdemain, the study shows that the mortality of real-life heart failure patients after ICD implantation for primary prevention is the same as that in the trials, and less than that of the control patients in the trials. Which I guess is a useful thing to know.”

….

“I don’t think that by itself it changes practice in any way, but it does show that recombinant human relaxin 2, serelaxin, is an interesting new treatment that deserves further study in heart failure.”